A Great Leap for Genetics - A Symphony in Our Cells

January 17, 2019

Source:
fsspx.news

The American magazine Science granted the “Discovery of the Year” prize to new technologies that reveal how DNA sends a signal to each cell to make it accomplish its particular activity and develop over time.

According to scientists, the progress made by this new technology will transform science over the coming decades, making it possible to predict the process of aging, development and healing illnesses more and more precisely, explained the AFP on December 20, 2018, the day Science awarded its traditional “Discovery of the Year” prize:

Just as a music score indicates when strings, brass, percussion, and woodwinds chime in to create a symphony, a combination of technologies is revealing when genes in individual cells switch on, queuing the cells to play their specialized parts.

Specialists are now working on how to use these techniques on human cells, in order to study the way they age and regenerate, but also to finally understand the alterations that cause cancer, diabetes, or other physical malformations.

“The single-cell revolution is just starting,” concludes the article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the most important federations of scientific organizations and the editor of the Science magazine.

The Role of Science

Developing our knowledge of the human genome is a good thing in itself, but scientific progress, if considered as an absolute and left to itself, with neither rule nor purpose, is not morally indifferent. Especially when used by transhumanism in its search for a utopic abolition of old age, sickness and death.

A recent symposium organized by the Institut Universitaire Saint-Pie X highlighted the way the ideology of progress in the scientific realm leads man to disconnect human reason from the Divine Reason at work in nature. All-powerful, creative, lacking a true finality and with no eternal happiness to conquer, human reason gives itself up to progress as to a sterile indetermination, endlessly transforming the world.

In the light of the Faith that regulates it indirectly – for it has its own proper object – science cannot play God and attack human nature on the pretext of free research and experimentation.

For man was created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26). St. Basil of Caesarea, commenting on this passage from the Bible, explains that man has, as it were, been introduced into God’s “workshop”, receiving the ability to know the marvels of His creation.

But this power granted to man cannot be blind, explains St. Basil:

By giving us the ability to be like God, He has allowed us to be the artisans of our resemblance to God, so that we can deserve a reward for our work, so that we need not be lifeless objects like the portraits made by the hands of a painter, so that the result of our resemblance may not serve for the praise of another.

May the specialists on the human genome meditate upon these wise words in order to draw the best profit from the talents they have received. In particular, by recognizing that the destruction of an embryo with a DNA that contains the program for a human life cannot be the elimination of a simple “cluster of cells”.